Anti-war protesters in Belfast clash with deranged monarchists over Iran

Around 250 people gathered outside Belfast’s City Hall on Monday March 2 to voice their disgust at the illegal aggression launched against Iran by US/Zionist terrorists. They were met by a much smaller crowd of around 30 people voicing their support for Reza Pahlavi. The man they are backing is the son of the Shah of Iran deposed in 1979 during the Iranian revolution.

He has bravely been willing to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood from his home in the United States. Earlier this year he encouraged desperate young people to their death in protests met with brutal force by the theocrats in Tehran. Now he’s happy for his own people to be butchered again by the thugs in Washington and Tel Aviv. All this so he can regain the 1,648,195 km² of Iran he sees as his personal property, along with the 90 million people within it.

Monarchists back alternate form of tyranny

Supporters of Pahlavi at times waded into the crowd of anti-war demonstrators to try and instigate confrontation. Some of the former group brandished ‘Israeli’ flags and were met with shouts of “Zionist scum, off our streets”.

A slightly larger group of monarchists gathered at the same location on Sunday after the murder of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Many held the flag of the Zionist entity on that occasion too, indicating they are also happy for ordinary Iranian people to be treated as expendable in the name of installing the self-appointed “Shah II”.

Gerry Carroll, West Belfast MLA for People Before Profit was the first speaker, successfully able to drown out interruptions from the monarchists. He started by denouncing the massacre of school children carried out by Zionist savages.

I don’t know anybody who claims they’re for freedom and democracy and human rights, but then cheer a school in Iran being blown to bits and at least 160 children being killed. In my eyes, in most people’s eyes across the world, that is not democracy, human rights and dignity. And we’re here to stand against that quite clearly and loudly.

He also called out the hypocrisy of the US demanding an end to Iran’s nuclear program:

The International Atomic Energy Authority…have said…that Iran is compliant when it comes to nuclear weapons. Now, I don’t think there should be any nuclear weapons across the world, but [we] must remind ourselves: who is the country, the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons? I’ll give you a clue. This, the United States government, they have used it on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Never trust Zionists

Palestinian Mohammad Samana told the Pahlavi supporters backing so-called ‘Israel’ to beware, based on the bitter experience of his people:

For our friends, there protesting: nobody experienced ‘Israel’ as much as the Palestinians. They came to our land claiming being the victims. We welcomed them. And they took our land and created their apartheid state.

‘Israel’ told the world in 1993, that there will be a Palestinian state by 1998. But they used the agreement to steal more Palestinian land and ensured that they prevented the creation of a Palestinian state and colonised the West Bank and destroyed Gaza.

Crucially, Iranian Azedeh Sobout spoke too, saying:

I stand before you as an Iranian woman, one who opposes the men who rule my country now and the men who ruled it before. The current theocratic regime that massacred thousands of protesters in January and the monarchists backed up by U.S. standing at the other side. There is a space for people like me, [though] very little, in this current geopolitical script because we are constantly told that we must choose. Choose between a dictator and a bombing campaign. Choose between repression and destruction. Choose between submission and annihilation.

We reject that choice. This binary is false. It is coercive and it erases our political agency. It assumes that Iranians cannot imagine or build a future beyond the options imposed on us by empires and dictators. That logic is colonial. Their logic is colonial. That’s why they can only ally with the US, Israel and British colonial systems.

Regime change starts at home

She concluded:

Align your solidarity with our revolutionary philosophy: Jin, Jîyan, Azadî; woman, life, freedom. A vision rooted in Kurdish feminist struggle. A struggle [which] the monarchists are terrified of…because it’s based on feminist, working class resistance and democratic dignity.

And if you believe in regime change, begin it at home. Thank you.

Her last words are an essential message. We’re limited in the direct effect we can have on events thousands of miles away. What we can effect is that which happens right where we stand, in our own communities, town halls and parliaments. That means sweeping away any politician that shows the merest hint of sympathy towards the terrorist forces of the United States and so-called ‘Israel’.

Featured image via the Canary